make living with diabetes easier

Eversense CGM — More time in range

The chip, my diabetes and I

Ten days after I got my Eversense sensor I feel more comfortable. The wound is healed and the cut is really small (I guess about 4-5mm). At the beginning, I was very careful with the plaster and the transmitter. I thought that I might hurt myself, therefore I left the stripes and the plaster at my arm for about a week. To find the right place for the transmitter wasn’t easy, because the transmitter needs to be right on top of the sensor to get power.

After several days and attempts I’m used to it and I can find the sweet spot very quickly. What I recently found out is, that you can also just detach and attach the transmitter without removing the plaster. This is good to safe time.

A big advantage of this system is the little amount of plastic that I have to trough away in comparison to other CGM- and Blood glucose meter manufacturers. No inserter, sensors, test stripes or needles that I need every week or every day.

Force of habits

To charge the transmitter every day is still not a CGM dream. Especially if you are traveling you shouldn’t forget the special charging cable. The charging itself is now integrated into my daily evening routine. Whenever I take a shower I quickly charge the transmitter. In general it’s a nice trick to combine habits with other habits. To inspire you — some of my habits look like this:

?+ ?+?
Measure + Inject + Eat

? + ?
Shower + Charge Transmitter or

? + ? + ?
Brush teeth + Charge Transmitter + Sleep

☕ + ?
Tee / Coffee + Relax

⏰ +?
Alarm + Snooze

⏱ + ?
Stand up + E-Mails

Scared of nighttime hypos

There are also bad habits, to detected and to change them is not easy at all. A CGM System helped me to find some of these bad habits, I was able to understand how food and activity was influencing my glucose level. Often, I hear that Type-1 diabetics are allowed to eat everything they want to and the therapy ‘just’ needs to be adjusted. That’s easier to say than done. For me it was easier to change my eating habit. Now I eat salad for dinner instead of a high carb and high fat meal. This improved the way I sleep and with a low carb dinner I’m not so afraid to fall into a hypo at night. Calculating the units is way easier now. This changed also the time in range score. If I have a good sugar while I’m sleeping I spend 8 hours in range. This is already 1/3 of the day.

Some up and downs

Due to a crack in my basal insulin ampulla that I didn’t recognized I wasn’t able to improve my time in range last week. Too bad that my insulin went into the pen instead of my leg. Even though I was able to lower some glucose level peaks, because of the warnings of the CGM. In addition to that I figured out that the trend arrow is a bit jumpy and I couldn’t trust it. I’ve been told that it will stabilize after 10 days. So, I’ll know more next week.